Semantic Scholar and BigDIVA: Two New Advanced Search Platforms Launched for Scientists and Historians

As powerful, essential and ubiquitous as Google and its search engine peers are across the world right now, needs often arise in many fields and marketplaces for platforms that can perform much deeper and wider digital excavating. So it is that two new highly specialized search platforms have just come online specifically engineered, in these cases, for scientists and historians. Each is structurally and functionally quite different from the other but nonetheless is aimed at very specific professional user bases with advanced researching needs.

Let’s have a look at both of these latest innovations and their implications. To introduce them, I will summarize and annotate two articles about their introductions, and then I will pose some additional questions of my own.

Semantic Scholar is supported by artificial intelligence (AI)¹ technology. It is automated to “read, digest and categorise findings” from approximately two million scientific papers published annually. Its main objective is to assist researchers with generating new ideas and “to identify previously overlooked connections and information”. Because of the of the overwhelming volume of the scientific papers published each year, which no individual scientist could possibly ever read, it offers an original architecture and high-speed manner to mine all of this content.

Oren Etzioni, the director of A2I, termed Semantic Scholar a “scientist’s apprentice”, to assist them in evaluating developments in their fields. For example, a medical researcher could query it about drug interactions in a certain patient cohort having diabetes. Users can also pose their inquiries in natural language format.

This is joint project by the digital humanities scholars at NC State University and Texas A&M University. Its objective is to assist researchers in, among other fields, literature, religion, art and world history. This is done by increasing the speed and accuracy of searching through “hundreds of thousands of archives and articles” covering 450 A.D. to the present. BigDIVA was formally rolled out at NC State on October 16, 2015.

BigDIVA presents users with an entirely new visual interface, enabling them to search and review “historical documents, images of art and artifacts, and any scholarship associated” with them. Search results, organized by categories of digital resources, are displayed in infographic format4. The linked NC State News article includes a photo of this dynamic looking interface.

This system is still undergoing beta testing and further refinement by its development team. Expansion of its resources on additional historical periods is expected to be an ongoing process. Current plans are to make this system available on a subscription basis to libraries and universities.

My Questions

Might the IBM Watson, Semantic Scholar, DARPA and BigDIVA development teams benefit from sharing design and technical resources? Would scientists, doctors, scholars and others benefit from multi-disciplinary teams working together on future upgrades and perhaps even new platforms and interface standards?

What other professional, academic, scientific, commercial, entertainment and governmental fields would benefit from these highly specialized search platforms?

Would Google, Bing, Yahoo and other commercial search engines benefit from participating with the developers in these projects?

Would proprietary enterprise search vendors likewise benefit from similar joint ventures with the types of teams described above?

What entrepreneurial opportunities might arise for vendors, developers, designers and consultants who could provide fuller insight and support for developing customized search platforms?